Collating Cards

Some of you may have seen the question I posted on my Voice-Over Friends FaceBook group about scanning business cards. It occurred to me it might be beneficial to wrap-up and summarize those answers, and share some options that were NOT mentioned there.

If you responded to my question on FaceBook, I’m most grateful for your answer, and I’ll try to make sure and give you attribution here.

My quandary is this: I return from FaffCon or APAC, or one of the VOICE conventions with a mitt-full of business cards, and in the ensuing weeks, they tend to get lost or mixed in with some other cards, and disarrayed in some way and then the potentially valuable info is lost. I had specifically asked for solutions OTHER than taking pics with an Android or iOS smartphone, but it turns out those devices may be the best answer after all.

My friend Cliff Zellman was the first to respond with the suggestion of NeatDesk which I’ve seen him recommend other times. This hardware/software solution makes a convincing argument for ease-of-use and digital filing. Thanks, Cliff!

A couple of other people suggested the CardMunch app “…a free iPhone app that turns business cards into contacts…” It’s a product of LinkedIn, so that alone would get my attention, because of my affinity to this business social network. This solution seemed to get the most “likes”.

Of those three, Hello and ScanBizCards are a dead tie, and both of them outperform CardMunch AND Card Cruncher in my humble estimation. Here’s why: CardMunch does a masterful job of correctly/easily scanning your card and sharing that info as a LinkedIn contact, but Hello and ScanBizCards go even a step further seeking profiles of the card-scanned identity on Twitter and Facebook. It also saves to your smartphone contacts, allows you to email the contact, pulls in your contacts from other services, and Hello shares to Evernote.

My quest also led me to another amazing app for $3.99 called Power Contacts…which shares info with ScanBizCards. This app is so full-featured, that I haven’t even had the time to explore all it does, yet. If you’re looking for a way to organize your contacts, though, this may be worth a serious look. For one things it lets you import and export .csv files, which comes in handy for developing mailing lists. See my blog: TAKING COMMAND OF YOUR CONTACTS.

Let me just float a couple of other suggestions. Natalie Stanfield Thomas suggested turning all your biz card dilemma over to Virtual Assistant Karen Souer. An excellent suggestion! There are other virtual assistants all over the internet, but Karen is so tapped into the VO community that it’s an added bonus for all of us.

ShoeBoxed will scan almost anything you send it, and make a virtual copy available to you on the web, on Evernote, and elsewhere in the cloud. ShoeBoxed sends you an indestructible mailing envelope (with your own identifying code stamped on it). You stuff all your docs in it and mail it off. A few days later, all your scanned and categorized docs will appear under your account on ShoeBoxed, and the paper gets send back to you, along with another fresh pouch. I’ve been using it for all my business and personal receipts. How much time I’ve saved is incalculable. They do business cards too.

One of the coolest things about ShoeBoxed is that it integrates with tons of other programs on the web, especially online accounting software like the one I use, now: XERO, not to mention Evernote (hell, just about everything connects to Evernote these days!).

Doe you have a favorite business card scanning solution that was not mentioned here?